Day 27 06.08.15
It was time to say a short goodbye to Antigua, as we were going to return after a couple of days. Therefore we packed and left our big luggage at the hotel and travelled on a lot lighter.
On our way to the market of Chichicastenango, we stopped at a lookout to enjoy a great view of the lake and its surrounding volcanoes. Still very impressive – I am really looking forward to climbing one of them!
We continued and stopped for breakfast at a petrol station (at least I did) and went crazy when buying strawberries, getting a carrot juice that was freshly prepared there, some tostadas with a chicken spread topped with cheese and a bit of hot sauce. Yum! It was really some great food and the rule of watching the food be prepared for a minute before ordering did pay off. It helps if you watch the locals while preparing their food, to see whether the preparation is clean and therefore safe to eat. Apparently it only takes a minute for someone to make a mistake if they are not working on clean conditions.
We drove on to the market of Chichicastenango and had about 2 hours to stroll through it and also grab a bite to eat. First we took a quick look at the church in Chichicastenango. This church is quite unusual, as it is a Catholic church, and a place for Mayan rituals all in one.
Apart from the altar there are also stones in the centre aisle for different offerings and rituals. Sometimes they will even kill chickens in there, which is a quite something to wrap your head around if you are a Western Christian. I thought it was interesting to see, that the wooden ornamental panels distributed around the hall, displaying the Christian churches prosperity, were all very dark and the pictures on them hardly recognisable. All the soot from the fires all these years weren’t helpful for preventing their decay. This “decay” makes the hall / church a lot more approachable for the Mayans, since they focus on living a simple life, with no big riches, living simple but fulfilled. Therefore it would not really be appropriate for them to hold their rituals in a church filled with golden ornaments.
We continued on the market looking for a place to eat. We found it and sat in one of the market stalls. Here 3 lovely ladies were hard at work at preparing the different foods. I had some chicken soup, which was just delicious, where others tried some fried chicken with beans and rice.
I really felt like I was in the heart of the bustling life of the locals, which I find all markets evoke in me. It is just such an easy way to experience what people purchase and eat on a day-to-day basis.
We hopped back onto the bus on our way to San Jorge la Laguna where we would enjoy a night in a homestay. First of all we stopped by another lookout onto the lake where we could see 3 inactive volcanoes spread around the lake.
To shorten our bus ride we started playing a fun game: Whenever you see an animal at the side of the road, be it a dog, a cat, a goat, a cow or a horse, you would open the window, shout at the animal “hey dog!” and if the animal turned around to look at you, you win. Absolutely hilarious, especially when there are other people around on the street. We definitely came to the conclusion, “dogs are easy, but cows, cows are hard”…
Soon after we arrived at the town of our homestays. We were assigned our families on the town plaza and headed off to see where we would be staying the night.
We followed our host mother to her house right behind the goal on the city plaza and found a little house made out of bricks, with two bedrooms and a kitchen / dining room. We were offered one bedroom and the host mother Theresa shared the other room with her 6! Children. I am not sure if they all stayed there during the night we were there or whether some went on to stay with their grandparents. But still, in their living / bedroom there were three beds. The rest of the house was kept very simple. Yes it did have electricity, but the water supply was a little bit more difficult. Some of the water was filtered via a special bucket filtering system the rest came from a large tank of the roof and rainwater. This meant that water was filled into a large basin from which the water that was needed was taken out and used. The kitchen had a stove fuelled with firewood and something she was very proud of, a gas stove.
We spoke a little to get to know one another and were happy to find out she could speak a great deal of Spanish and even a couple of words in English. We headed out for a stroll around the town to see get another peek at the lake and also to explore the town a little. We all met up again at the town square and watched the boys play football. Some of our group even joined in and it was a fun time being the cheerleaders at the sidelines. A lot of children grouped around us and were curious looking at our cameras and the pictures we had taken along the way. Suddenly we were also surrounded by pretty much all street dogs of the town that were just lying about next to us enjoying the last rays of sun before the sun set.
We had a quick glimpse into the town church that had its anniversary today, and admired the large floral displays that were set up for that occasion. The church had been partially destroyed due to an earthquake causing its shape to alter over the years, becoming longer and wider due to partial collapses on the left side and the back.
After the sun had set, it got quite chilly rapidly, and so we chose to go back to the house.
Here we got to know the entire family. The host mother Theresa is a widow with 6 children, working as a cleaning lady at other houses and looking after 2 children to make ends meet. She also uses one of her two rooms as a place for tourists to stay. There are 15 families in the town that offer these home stays and they rotate with providing their accommodation. Meaning that if Theresa had us staying over today, she couldn’t have a new group staying over the next day (Depending on the demand for home stays of course).
Her children range between 19 and 7 and all go to school. With one of her daughters, Nikta, I talked quite a lot about the school system, as she is currently studying to become a teacher. Their school system is split up into three parts. The first part is the normal primary school, the second part is the basic where they learn the basic parts of the careers they want to go into and the third part is the specialisation. This means that the children need to know which career they will pursue when they are only 14 years old. Another family told their guests that school costs are about 100 Quetzales per month per child, which is equivalent to 11,87 Euros. This might not seem that much, but you have to work hard for these 100 Quetzales and if you then multiply that amount by 6 for all of her children, it is even harder.
We all bought some sort of gift for our family and I got Theresa a pot for her to cook with. She was really happy about it, thanked me a lot and said how useful this was for her. I was glad she liked the present and didn’t feel like I was stepping on her toes or something like that. We sat down later on at dinner and I saw my pot standing on a little shelf. Underneath there was a whole arrangement of other pots, so I hope she really did find this new pot useful and didn’t just say that to make me feel better…
Theresa’s son Wagner came home from school and we talked a lot about rituals and customs of the people in his town, be it the Catholics or the Mayans. They would have different processions around the town, where for example the statues in the church were carried out and presented to everyone accompanied by dance and songs.
We also talked a lot about their language, Kaqchikel, and how that was spread throughout the village and how it changed as soon as you passed to another region on the lake. The language is made up of different clicking noises combined with several tz and ch sounds. It really is quite interesting to hear. Nikta, being a schoolteacher and all, even brought me a notebook where I could see how the Kaqchikel alphabet looked like. It is really hard to read and pronounce some of the words because they stem from a completely different language base and also are hard, as you are not used to using your entire throat while speaking to be able to form the corresponding sounds.
Theresa also offered me to wear some of the traditional clothing, so we got dressed. The clothing consists of a heavily embellished blouse, a thick and heavy skirt, which is also embellished, held up by belt that is wrapped around the top of the skirt, also highly embellished. Here the focus lies less on the cut of the clothing, but more on the embellishments and colours of the traditional clothing. Especially in the towns a lot of women wear these blouse, skirt and belt combinations.
In this full attire we tried ourselves at the tortilla making. Tortillas are made by taking a small amount of corn “masa”, which is made from corn that is slightly cooked, and washed to remove the little skin that covers the corn, is then dried and ground to form a sort of corn powder. Water is then added to the form a consistency of easily to handle cookie dough. This masa is then rolled into a small ball, spread out on the balls of your hands and in a clapping motion formed into little round tortillas. Even though this doesn’t sound that challenging, you have to keep up some momentum in order not to break the tortilla, keep nice and evenly round and to not cut into the edges. When the little “tortilla pancake” is ready, it is placed onto a sort of round tray that lies straight on the fire or gas flame to cook it. They are ready fairly quickly and then set to rest in little baskets with cloth over them to still keep them warm. Wonderful! The women make large amounts of tortilla as they are eaten with every meal. They sometimes even replace a knife and are used to shovel the food onto the tortilla.
The women tend to usually use their stoves fuelled with fire as they give the tortillas a bit more flavour. She chose not to do it with us, as the smoke that comes out of the stove doesn’t leave the kitchen, and so we would have been eating in a smoke filled kitchen.
Meanwhile Theresa was preparing our dinner. It was really great having a home cooked meal after so much restaurant food. She made us beans with rice in a tomatoey sauce, some vegetables and I even got some chicken with my food. It was great and we ate or dinner with some members of the family (all wouldn’t have fit at the table) and enjoyed talking about this and that until we felt tired and went to sleep early.
